Jean Caron wrote:
Folks,Jean,
I searched the archive, tried different things, yet I need to ask a few questions.
I'm running SA 3.0.2 with Qmail/QQ 1.25, and procmail, on linux. Works great. Bayes auto-learns ok, I run sa-learn from a "dedicated" user every night for ham and spam. My logs show how many msgs were inspected and how many were learned. So far so good.
Here's the part I'm unsure of, I have one centralized bayes DB own by this "dedicated" user. This user runs sa-learn against two shared folders, one for ham and one for spam. All users (only a hand full) may populate the shared folders. Many thousand msgs have gone through sa-learn. I thought this was all too easy...
My problem is bayes does not seem to have any effect what so ever on the amount of spam delivered to INBOXes. I keep receiving these low score spam msgs still.
I now suspect this centralized DB, updated by this user alone, may not produce the expected results. I've read in the archive that individual users should run cron jobs against their own ham and spam folders. The issue with this is that only one user has an actual shell defined on the system, so the others can't run cron. Then again, that just a suspicion, I may be wrong, and something else may be missing or mis-configured, and that's why I'm posting this... I'm a little confused. I don't understand how bayes works exactly, so I can't come to any helpfull conclusion about my setup.
Can anyone see through this and help me understand what is happening ?
Thanks in advance,
Jean
I'm not entirely sure based on the information you provided how spamd is getting called, but I'm quite sure that your setup is not doing what you expect it to. I'm guessing since you say that you are using procmail that you have user accounts set up on the server itself and that spamc is being called as individual users from .forward files. If this is the case, then each user will have a .spamassassin/ directory in their home which will contain their own personal Bayes database. Your problem is that you have one particular user who runs sa-learn, so only their Bayes DB is being trained (other than through the auto-learning feature, that is, which is updating the individual databases).
One easy option you can consider is the use of a global Bayes DB for all your users instead of each of them having their own personal DB. Bayes tends to be less effective with global rather than personal databases, but only if the individual users are able to do their own training. You could do this fairly easily by setting the "bayes_path" option in your /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf file and have it point the .spamassassin/ directory of the user who is doing all the sa-learn training.
Hope that helps. Kevin
